Happy New Year! Along with all of those personal improvement resolutions you’ve made, here are some professional resolves to consider for improving your company’s fleet-related content marketing efforts in 2015:

- Get the year started right with a content marketing strategy. Content marketing is designed to overcome the trend of web-enabled prospects conducting their discovery stage online before even reaching out to your company. Today, that information-gathering process happens throughout the buying process and even post-sale.

Marketers cannot afford to be passive; you must have a comprehensive approach to reach and engage prospects throughout the buying cycle in order to win a deal and to keep customers.

READ MORE to learn how to design a comprehensive content marketing strategy that works!

By Keith Trumbull

For those of us in the fleet industry, it’s important to keep up with the latest trends to ensure we’re making profitable decisions. For example, in 2014 we saw more fleet managers interested in telematics, as well as an uptick in automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for warehouse and assembly fulfillment. Last year, we worked with many fleet managers focused on understanding the total cost of asset ownership and lifecycle management.

Whether you’ve been working with material handling equipment, you’re getting started as we enter the New Year, or you plan to take on asset management in the future, you may find our short list of 2015 predictions helpful.

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We always welcome the opportunity to interview Donlen president Tom Callahan; he is indefatigably passionate about the company and the fleet industry. Here, he updates us on Donlen’s focus over the past year and also gives us some insight into what the best managed fleets have in common.

His advice to suppliers on working with Procurement: “Don’t be in a situation where your customer asks, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ You want to be thought of as the supplier that is still coming with the best and the greatest ideas.”

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Narrowing the list of the year’s best automobiles is a tough business. With carmakers cranking out updated models on quicker cycles, and into increasingly diverse and competitive segments, drivers have a growing list of great options.

This 10-best list for 2014 is a testament to that cutthroat competition, with winners from every major car-making country — Germany, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. — and across a wide spectrum of segments and price ranges.

READ MORE to find out who the winners are.

Car recalls and exploding airbags may have dominated news coverage in recent months, but vehicle safety is quickly gaining ground, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which announced its list of 2015 safety awards last week.

A total of 71 models earned the institute’s two top awards — Top Safety Pick+ or Top Safety Pick — up from 39 this time last year, giving consumers more choices for vehicles with excellent crash protection despite tougher requirements for safety, according to the group, a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry.

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A new study finds nearly half of drivers ages 15 to 17 who died in car crashes from 2008 to 2012 had cars that were at least 11 years old, and nearly a third drove small cars.

The study, authored by two Insurance Institute for Highway Safety researchers, chronicled the government’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System data from 2008 to 2012.

READ MORE to get the details.

The Detroit Bureau

A small Toronto technology start-up could unlock some major changes in tomorrow’s cars, trucks and crossovers.

Keyfree Technologies plans to introduce what it is billing as the “world’s first digital car key solution” during a preview at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show. Unlike traditional, metal car keys, or more modern wireless keyfobs, the company’s system would use a digital smartphone app to control a vehicle’s doors and ignition.

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American motorists have a particularly good reason to celebrate the New Year, unleaded regular gasoline averaging barely $2.40 a gallon across the country, according to federal data, as low as the price has been in more than half a decade.

But not everyone is sharing in the good news. The relatively small number of motorists – along with the nation’s truckers — who depend on diesel are paying an average of $3.28 a gallon, according to the most recent survey by the Energy Information Administration.

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How much pot can a person smoke and then drive safely? It’s a question more and more states are grappling with as the legalization of marijuana becomes more widespread.

Those states are not alone as nearly half of Americans express similar concerns and report feeling that drug-impaired drivers are a bigger problem today compared to three years ago, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

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For the automotive industry, 2014 was the year of the recall.

During harsh Congressional hearings, the world learned more about the inner workings of the ignition switches of cars and trucks than ever before as GM’s new CEO, Mary Barra, was forced to explain a flawed corporate culture that the company thought it had left behind.

General Motors’ recall led all automakers to reassess their safety processes, and the industry is on track to easily surpass 1999, when automakers recalled a record 55.6 million cars and trucks.

But there were other big stories in the automotive industry in 2014 as well.

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